a a with . ready and that's are out for the our coming up, a former pentagon official discuss is just how much money, particularly american taxpayer money is spent and often wasted on the u. s. war machine. next on modus operandi. stake both

with what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have. it's crazy even foundation, let it be an arms race is on, often very dramatic development. only personally, i'm going to resist. i don't see how that strategy will be successful, very critical time time to sit down and talk ah, ah . as you can see, war, discuss where all this money escalate. just in the 10 months we've been in ukraine

. right. $100000000000.00. that's more than what we spent was approaching what we spent on vietnam over a number of years, right. so from, from 1965 to 1900. 73. we're only 10 months into your brain. that's 100000000000 already. where, where is it going? we don't know, mike, it's inflation. it's more, it's more than that, and i, it's a livelihood, it's keeping it an entire industry and population of the united states employed. absolutely. now, you know, and for the, the big pentagon contractors, whether it be amazon web services, as, as i outlined, just a moment ago, raytheon all these big contractors, these, how big a business is war for these guys? well, seeing that the, seeing that the budget you're laughing in that the budget is increasing every year

. it's, it's, it's absolutely essential because they've got to, if you look at it in the empirical sense, the, you gotta have a, you've got to have an army that it's capable of international coverage to do that. it, it costs a lot of money and we're, we're all around the world. we have bases everywhere. we have $800.00 basis and, and they all cost a lot of money and they need support. then they, they need direct military support and they need some of the stuff along the sides and the custodial services. they showed a contract that was $116000000.00. and that's one here. that's correct. and that does not include pay raises for the military guys, military people. so this is, it's escalated every year. and in order to justify, they've got to justify congress. right. and sometimes congress will just give the

money because there's a special pet rock project and particularly like, but to do that, you've got to justify the existence and need for that kind of military spending. so you go out and wreak havoc everywhere. let me ask you this, do these military contractors, so they ever just kind of over inflate what they're going to charge. then of course they've got to, yes they, they've got to, they've got to look out for themselves. they're worth billions and some of these contractors, let's say raytheon for example, about 90 percent of its punches from the front. the defense department. i would imagine it, what would happen if all that was taken away? a lot of firing. i mean, i can't imagine like, i mean, i rattled off some of these custodial services and what have you. i can't imagine that they're charging, you know, if they're, they're sweeping the grounds at a military base or sweeping mopping the floors at the d o. d. i can't imagine that they're charging for office cleaning services. you know, joe shows business the same. right. it's got,

it's got to come from someplace. and that comes from the defense, but it's a markup. yeah. they get a markup. yep. i see. i see where this is going. yeah. now let's talk about waist in war. so a 2017 rand corporation report details billions upon billions of good money port and after bat in places like afghanistan and iraq. and of course it was that time, it was 2017. so as an example, one of the more agree, just wasted money that was found was this. and i'm going to read the extra peer. it says, you know, in afghanistan, d o d spent 486000000 to purchase 20 g triple 2, medium lift cargo planes for the afghan air force do to poor planning, poor oversight, poor contract management, and a lack of critical spare parts. the aircraft could not be kept flight worthy. the program was cancelled in march 2013 after experiencing continuous and severe

operational difficulties. including a lack of spare parts. 16 of the 20 aircraft were sold for scrap metal for $0.06 a pound or $32000.50. so the $0.50 was just adding insult to injury. i think, but $32000.00 and the $0.50 camper got the 50 that he might have a $1000000000.00. there was reduced to a measly 30 grand. i mean, you've gotta be kidding me. how does, how well, there's no accountability. i mean this, this can go into, you never have congress doing oversight. they don't want to do oversight. they don't want it. the, the, the fence budget is almost like a sacred cow. and they've got to keep feeding the troughing. and because they, because the defense department creates employment in the congressional district, you take the f 35 for example. totally bloated budget. so that still doesn't work

all that great. and you're doing very generous. i know. and yet, what the contractors do is they try, they put some components of, of manufacturer of that aircraft in every district and of every state of the united states. so that continued funding for that project, okay, requires approval by every member of congress. so they've got skin in the game. that's correct. everyone has oh wow. yeah. and that's just, that's just f 35. what about the other program? right? the same thing. every component comes from a different state virtually. and that's how they do it. so make sure every member of congress has skin in the game, correct? holy cow. mike maloof don't go anywhere. we have a lot more to unpack with you. all right,

and you don't go anywhere because coming up next. we'll be talking about the until billions of dollars going to ukraine. we'll discuss it when we return. sit tight. the emma will be right back in the the me watching was controlled by give me the ball and the shadow showed on phenomenon from this day last scan. when i knew what i could just question, the profile is national shylie or

when you're going to get on with the the, the, the the welcome back to the ammo. i'm manila chan, former pentagon official, mike maloof has agreed to spill the beans about how the pentagon spends so much money and sticking around. thank you, mike. so let's move over to the war in ukraine. now, if people thought we spent tons of money in afghanistan, the ukraine numbers, i mean, the way it's tracking in under a year already, the u. s. has committed more money to ukraine than it did the 1st 5 years in afghanistan. we're talking over $5050000000000.00 in the 1st 6 months, and it's gone up since then. i can't even keep track anymore versus under $8000000000.00 in afghanistan over 5 years. how is that possible?

i mean, is it simply an inflation adjustment or is there something else? well, it's going to be taking advantage of an opportunity to, to increase spending on the one and trying to meet a demand. the, the, the lack of accountability of where the, where the money is actually going. and so, and that's kind of and that's going to become part of the problem. there's no way to be able to understand why this money goes out and, and some of us to question seriously the justification for it even going out anywhere since the, by the ministration has never undertaken. an effort to, to, to show us what the national security imperative is. right. we don't touch on our own. yeah, we can't justify. and, but, but it's not just,

it's not about ukraine. this is, this is part of a larger picture. the larger picture being containment of russia, using ukraine as a method of doing that. and that's worth every penny that it took to the, by the administration, but also some officials within the, by the ministration. who have a history of been instrumental in the coo, 2014 coo there and, and so they have a, they have an agenda. they have their own agenda, it's costing everybody. so we're going to go protect the borders of ukraine, but we won't protect our own southern border, and this is what we're no money allocated to that. now that hardly, now we don't even protect it, we can protect it, right? so that's becoming our own crisis. now, now national security, correct? right. but the amount of, but the, with congress changing over the house rather changing over to republican republicans who are requiring it when right mandate justification, right?

they want to seem like they want accountability and i happen to know that will not happen. there's no way it can happen. we've never had any justification of expenditures for afghanistan. iraq was, was like a moving target. there was so much corruption and, and also the, the military spending was just out of the world that to hadn't agenda. iraq had an agenda. and, and we lost, we lost track of, of afghanistan altogether. yeah. and as a concert, and we shoot me that over to iraq, think about that terrible cobble withdrawl that we saw. and all of that military equipment left behind, $85000000000.00 worth. right. so this is, you know, somebody made money from that. yeah. the companies that made it made money, and now it's been sold on the, on the international market. black market, right?

yes. are, and as a consequence, and that's the, that's the growing concern of what's being shipped right now to, to ukraine. yeah. okay. because because of the republicans coming in and expressing concern about accountability, they're going to send over 2 or 3 people will resign motors. yeah. being counters to reside in the embassy. they can't go outside and try to figure out where the most critical stuff is going. it's, it's, they can, they can't leave the embassy, they can't go out on the front lines. and what, what, what, what people like myself are concerned about is that we start bringing in advisors, advisors device before, before long. you have another vietnam on your hands. i say, and this, and again, we don't know what the game is and ukraine, but there are people making money from the people are making lots of money, a lot of contractors and a lot of particularly the manufacturers of the shipment that's going in hell. and,

and they're, they're making it so complicated, so sophisticated and that, that bring, that requires bringing in trainers. they've got to go into europe and all that, all that cost money, all of it. and there's no accountability as we saw with the f t x debacle. the more complicated and new words that you invent harder it is to track the money. and it sounds like that's kind of what's happening in the oh yeah, ukraine will be impossible to track any, any expenditures or where the equipment goes. it's not. so the concern is not so much the, well, it is a concern is the spending expenditure of the to, to, to purchase the equipment. but then the equipment itself that, that equipment could be spread all over the world. and it could go everywhere and it may not ever, ever reach its destination because we can't go out and look to examine and it could be sold off. yeah, it can get legs very much say they often get legs. one last thing about ukraine,

the pentagon has been explicit in saying, well, only 8000000000 is direct military spending. can you explain for us what exactly direct military spending actually means? well, because nobody can justify the budget. i think it's probably more of contingency funds and the training actual training military training that's given to them. but but direct military operations and funding is generally has to do with the overseas contingency funding that again, there's no no way to justify that. there's not lunch. yeah. we don't, we don't know where it goes. so this is, this is that, that, that one o. c o. contingency funding within the defense budget is let you get away with all kinds of stuff. it's the special language. i tell you, you invent new language for it and then then you can do whatever you want with it. now far be it from me to defend the pentagon. but with an annual budget review,

there always seems to be billions and billions of dollars that are accounted for. now to be fair, i know from my own contacts at the d o. d, that there are large sums that go missing as it would be alleged in media, but it simply stems from human accounting errors, right? it's not necessarily that people are walking off with bags of money. it's that there's accounting errors. it's human error, a decimal in the wrong place. the pdf doesn't copy correctly from one worker to the next. you know, after passes enough hand. bam, you're at millions of millions and millions of dollars that are quote missing. now this happened over and over every single year. no offense, but not everybody at the pentagon is necessarily a mathematician. how do you view these last so called last dollars or the prop? in many cases i meant to be last through secret programs. off the book type of

activities, look we, they had i g investigations for years in afghanistan. and there is no way that they could account. yeah. they could talk about fund funds and programs that just went awry and disappeared. equipment that was sent in for a water project, let's say not, not just weapons, but water. the pipes never did pipes disappear. you know, for, for water projects and millions are spent. and you have these types of programs. we in terms of reaching out to the locals to, to try to work on programs for them. and those, and invariably, the things wouldn't show up, or the, or it was ripped off. people were paid off down the line and, but how do you account for the right, this is, this is, you see the difference between now why, why over half the world right now wants,

wants to join the eurasian efforts by russia, china, it with belt road initiative. the expansion of bricks, as opposed to wanted to cozy up with the u. s. and we're seeing over half the population of the world. now, look into that. what's the difference? more construction by what, what china, turkey, russia, even iran, because they're all involved in building ro, silk road projects. they're constructing their building in infrastructure. the only, the only thing that people bother with us about, and we're seeing this also with saudi arabia. now, our security arrangements, that's it, that's why we have to offer, and invariably we, and to do that, part of the funding of course, is, is to help pay off projects such as what goes to saudi arabia. but see,

or even that's beginning to, to dry up a little bit because now the saudis want to look more eastward. but the bottom line is, is that there is a major shift truck toward a multi polar world. and that's what our can, the united states is now got to compete with. right. and, and this is, this is creating a real problem for us, right? direction. if our, if our america main industry is war, not everybody wants to invest, get a little tired of that. i see, i see where you're going with that. now, you mentioned earlier, the f 35. what about that tremendous cost overrun after cost overrun, project walk, he just can't get that thing. air worthy. this thing is, well over $412000000000.00, people in cost overruns, and it's at least what 5 years late. i mean, are these legitimate mike, i mean are, are these legitimately, you know, they can't get it right. or is this a means to rake in more money by lockheed,

and they're all their sub contract. it's a combination of things. a lot of times they, they, they want to put in virtually untested technology into brand new technology into a system which was design at a lower cost. but every time they want to add something or, or make that more capable in some fashion, it takes more, perhaps more research and development. it takes more money, certainly more money. and, and many cases, it's not proven. it's another g was thing to go on the, to go on the back to the drawing board. is that what it ultimately requires that because we're seeing this is that we saw this a little bit in the cost overruns for the, for the new air force. one, 1st of all, why do they need it? but, but you know, this is, this is another major cause they want to add new systems in, in there. and there was

a lot of complaints about it when the f 35 was being developed. now what we're hearing is that the f 35 skin on the, on the aircraft with it's stuff given it is self capability peels. oh, i can't often go faster than supersonic for, for any length of time. and so this once again shows the lack of proven development and k and but just trying to meet requirements, the of the latest g was stuff and it's not fully vetted and proven it, but it costs money. that's so you have your cost overruns, it's almost half a trillion dollar over it. that's just mine. that's a generalization. yeah. if we could really get into the details. that's just for one weapon system, right? one jet yes. was just mind blowing. now, what about congress? i mean, they are poised to pass the biggest pentagon budget in history,

a whopping $847000000000.00. that's 10 percent more than the previous year. they decided to throw in an extra 45000000000 on top of the ask that came out of the d o d, and what joe biden wanted. there's virtually no descent over this proposal. you touched on why a little earlier. now in the old days, do the budgets were scrutinized line by line by congressional staffers. now those days are long gone. where is all this money actually going? well, as i said a little earlier, there's also going to be 4.3 percent increase in and pay for the true. yeah, that's just one basis for example, have to be upgraded and kept and kept going. and they have 200 some odd base. yeah. because you know, they, they have mold that might develop over time,

and up that they need to be kept up. and so this is just part of the problem, but we're also, we're also coming up with these other crazy things for, for example, ukraine. where does that end, where it's a bottom bottomless pit right now. right. and again, but the, the administration has not expressed the policy. you're supposed to have an end game on this. we're just about ready to be shoved into a war that isn't, that doesn't count the with netanyahu come in on online, back ask in the united states to, to start bombing you iranian sites. when, when does it end? when you know all of this takes money and commitment and you're going to have a greater you're going to have and you're going to need more contingency funding for this. and that, which is the real blank check. and you also have payments for contractors to go out

and do some of the dirty work. and usually they're about a $3.00 to $1.00 ratio to your troops. yes. and they they, they're very expensive. those guys are very expensive. i've heard, yes, they are very, very expensive. hired guns? that's correct. so are you saying it's justified this? 47? no i that's a question of policy i. i cannot justify the current policy that is being followed right now is a lot of money my. we've got to leave it right there. thank you. so much for the pentagon official, mike maloof, thanks for staying with us. the whole half hour. you're welcome. all right, that is going to do it for this week's episode of modus operandi the show that big deep into foreign policy. i'm your host manila chan. thank you for tuning in it. we'll see you again next week to figure out the m ah mm

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